Richard V. Damms is currently an Associate Professor of American history and Interim Head of the Department of Classical & Modern Languages and Literatures for 2026/27. He is a member of the History Department’s “War, Power, International Affairs” faculty. He is the author of two books: The Eisenhower Presidency, 1953-1961 (New York: Longman, 2002); and Scientists and Statesmen: Eisenhower’s Science Advisers and National Security Policy (Dordrecht: Republic of Letters, 2015).  He co-edited, with Mary Kathryn Barbier, Culture, Power, and Security: New Directions in the History of National and International Security (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2012). He has published articles and essays on science, technology and national security in World War II and the Cold War, and the Eisenhower era more generally.  His currently co-editing a book on presidential scandals, Scandal in the White House: Corruption, Immorality, and the American Presidency, for Edinburgh University Press, while he continues to work on a book-length project on Anglo-American relations in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez/Sinai Crisis. Since 2024 he has served as Book Review Editor for The Journal of Mississippi History. He has presented papers at international conferences in Taiwan, the United Kingdom, Ireland and the Netherlands. Damms is a past recipient of the Mississippi Humanities Council’s Humanities Teacher of the Year Award. He has supervised seven doctoral dissertations and welcomes the opportunity to supervise graduate theses and dissertations in diplomatic history, political history, and national security affairs broadly defined.

• Ph.D., Ohio State University, 1993

• Head of the Division of Arts and Sciences, MSU-Meridian
• Associate Professor, Mississippi State University
• 2003-06, Director of the Center for Historical Studies, established under the History Department's million-dollar Teaching American History Grant funded by the U.S. Department of Education.

• His currently co-editing a book on presidential scandals, Scandal in the White House: Corruption, Immorality, and the American Presidency, for Edinburgh University Press, while he continues to work on a book-length project on Anglo-American relations in the aftermath of the 1956 Suez/Sinai Crisis.

• “World War II and the New Deal for American Science,” in Johnathan Fennell, Alex Wilson, and Richard Hammond, eds., Revisiting the Peoples’ War: The Second World War in Socio-Political Perspective (Montreal, Canada: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2022), 162-84. 

  “Dwight D. Eisenhower and American Foreign Policy,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History (Oxford University Press, published August 2019), doi: http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.750

  “Eisenhower’s Farewell Address in history and memory,” in Michael Patrick Cullinane and Sylvia Ellis, eds., Constructing Presidential Legacy: How we Remember the American President (Edinburgh University Press, 2018)

  “Leadership and Decision Making,” in Chester J. Pach, ed., Blackwell Companion to Dwight D. Eisenhower (Wiley-Blackwell, 2017)

  

  Scientists and Statesmen: Eisenhower’s Science Advisers and National Security Policy (Republic of Letters, History of International relations, Diplomacy and Intelligence series, 2015)

• 

  The Eisenhower Presidency, 1953-1961, (Longman, Seminar Studies in History Series, 2002) 

• 

  Culture, Power and Security: New Directions in the History of National and International Security, co-edited with Mary Kathryn Barbier (Cambridge Scholars Press, 2012)

• “Dwight D. Eisenhower,” in Ken Gormley, ed., The Presidents and the Constitution (NYU Press, 2016)
•  “In Search of ‘some big, imaginative plan’: the Eisenhower Administration and American Strategy in the Middle East after Suez,” in Simon C. Smith, ed., Reassessing Suez 1956 (Ashgate, 2008) 
• “James Killian, the Technological Capabilities Panel, and the Emergence of President Eisenhower's ‘Scientific-Technological Elite’,” Diplomatic History (2000).  
• “Containing the Military-Industrial-Congressional Complex: President Eisenhower's Science Advisers and the Case of the Nuclear-Powered Aircraft,” Essays in Economic and Business History (1996)

• The Cold War
• Twentieth-Century World
• U.S. Diplomatic History
• United States and Latin America
• Modern Latin America
• U.S. History 1917-1945
• U.S. History since 1945